Lin Cheung
Jewellery designed for serious play.
Kitchen Paper, Plastic Bag, Paper and an Elastic Band, are not items on a list of corner shop essentials. These are the names of brooches by the British-Chinese jewellery designer Lin Cheung.
The objects, made from carved Recon stone, gold and carved rock crystal, are the opposite of throw-away, intended, as per the name of the collection, to Keep.
Keep is a wry look at how Lin stores and protects her own jewellery.
“Unceremoniously tucked in corners of plastic grip seal bags, wrapped like a slice of cake in kitchen paper, scrunched up in a tissue, folded in a handkerchief or secured with paper and an elastic band are just some of the ways the jewellery I wear and own is stashed and stowed,” explains the designer.
She pulls and handful of plastic grip seal bags from her pockets; each containing miscellaneous pieces of metal and stone – cuts of lapis lazuli, rose quartz and yellow carved Corian. Nearly ten years on from first exhibiting Keep, Lin’s pragmatic approach to owning material possessions has not changed.
Lin is an intriguing jewellery designer, whose output oscillates between installation pieces, work that contains political and social commentary, as well as high profile commissions, including the medals for the 2012 Paralympic Games in London. She picked up an Arts Foundation Award in 2001 and a Jerwood Contemporary Makers Award in 2008. In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Women’s Hour Craft Prize, while in 2018 she won the prestigious Francoise van den Bosch Award. She is also a teacher on the jewellery course at Central Saint Martins. As one critic said, “Lin’s work is a commentary on the human condition, a conveyor of the maker’s thoughts and feelings, a constant exploration into the meanings of jewellery.”
The designer recalls her earliest signs of creativity as “a constant source of annoyance to my parents,” joking that she spent her childhood making and breaking things. The third daughter of Chinese parents from Hong-Kong, Lin was born in the UK and grew up in Wiltshire, where her father ran a Chinese take-away. The family lived above the busy kitchen, and Lin would help her parents box up orders on the weekends. She describes her father’s practicality in contrast to her mother’s “philosophical, immediate and more domestic outlook on the world.” Together, her parents taught her to work with both thought and feeling – from one, she learned practicality and precision; from the other, an instinct for observation and abstraction.
Lin’s project Delayed Reactions takes this idea of contemplation and asserts it politically. The series of brooches, shaped like spring-pin buttons with little emoji-like faces. The series of carved stone object reflect the emotions Lin felt about the world around her. Confused, Speechless, Fallen, Nonplus, Slightly Sad and Frowning Face were her response to the events following the EU Referendum and the continued debate over Britain’s future in relation to Europe. But instead of being made from pressed metals or plastics, as traditional spring-pin buttons are, they’re impeccably carved out of semiprecious stones and dotted with gold stars. Pin-badges are traditionally of the moment – a humble communication device traditionally associated with political campaigns. Lin’s choice to work with stone, a material that is the opposite of throwaway, she explains: “Was a good test to see what remained in my thoughts… what surfaced after the dust had settled.”
“Delayed is a reference to the laboriousness of making in stone and the metaphoric meaning we associate with stone and stone carving,” Lin said in a previous interview with Art Forum. “Grinding, honing, whittling can also mean wearing away, ruminating, brooding, perfecting, reducing – the slow, physical acts of making sense of my thoughts, buying time before committing to resolutions like delayed gratification, deliberately having to wait.”
Lin’s work does have a very deliberate intention, despite its light sensibility. It’s political, not in a didactic or slogan-driven sense, but in how it draws our attention to the body as a site of power. Her objects ask: what do we value? What do we carry? How do we display or disguise our emotions? Jewellery is uniquely placed to ask these questions. Unlike other forms of artistic or political expression, it’s worn, and so makes ideology tactile.
Like the elastic bands and kitchen paper of her Keep collection, it suggests that the everyday can be re-evaluated – that the things we overlook or dismiss might actually carry the deepest meaning. And perhaps that is Lin Cheung’s most political act: to elevate the overlooked, and to show that even the smallest things – when worn close – can carry the heaviest weight.